The specification relates to information retrieval.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, for example, personal profile pages, video files, image files, audio files, or Web pages including content for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search system can select one or more resources in response to receiving a search query. Numerous different types of search queries may exist, including, e.g., search queries for products, books, people, and so forth.
In an example, a search query may include a search for the name of a person (“person name”), or be in a context related to a person. As most person names are not unique, an initial search on a person name can yield multiple search results that each reference resources describing different persons. For example, a search on the name of “John Smith” may yield search results that reference resources with information about an explorer, resources about a botanist and curator of Kew Gardens, resources about a professional wrestler, and still other resources about other people that are named “John Smith.” In this example, the search results are ranked and ordered (e.g., based on a relevance to the search query) and returned to a user. Generally, the search system selects and scores resources based on their relevance to the search query and on their importance relative to other resources to provide search results that link to the selected resources. The search results are typically ordered according to the scores.